Espedair Street

Jesus, if I even half-know a band's work I can spot a song within a bar; the first few notes of the introduction and I know it; but we'd play an intro, just the way it was on the album, and it would take... seconds, bars and bars for our fans to spot which favourite it was, and start trying to drown us out... I thought maybe it was just the time delay, sound taking that long to get from them to us, but I worked it out, and it wasn't; it was just people being slow.

But I'm not a natural crowd person; I don't pretend to understand or to relate to any of that sort of behaviour. I've never felt like part of a mass of people, not even at a football match. In a crowd of any sort, at a game, a concert, in a cinema or wherever, I never get totally carried away with whatever's going on. Part of me is always detached, observing, watching the other people around me; reacting to how they react, not to what they're reacting to.

There was a lot more I found worrying; like the people who wanted to know what sort of toothpaste we used and what our lucky number was, and what we wore in bed; like the backwoods geeks that were convinced to the point of inanity and insanity that they were The One for Davey, or Christine, or — God help them — both.

Then there were the Christians. Oh, jumping Jesus, the fundamentalists, the people who made old Ambrose Wykes and his folly look positively sensible and sane, and necessary.

Largely my fault. I'd said the wrong things.

It had happened on our first big tour in the States. I'd always been happy for Davey and Christine to do all the talking; they were the beautiful ones, after all, whereas I looked like a henchman in a Bond movie; hardly ideal prime time or front cover material. But in New York a lovely, intelligent, serious girl had requested an interview specifically with me, for a college magazine. I'd said I'd do it, but I'd been determined to put on my dumb and stuttering act the instant she asked me what my favourite colour was or how did I feel about being a rich and famous rock star?

Instead she asked sensible, reasonable questions, several of which actually had me thinking about them — suddenly seeing things in a new light — before answering; usually we all just regurgitated the same old answers to the same old questions. She was sweet and witty and nobody's fool, and I even made a date with her, after the tour was over, after failing to convince her she should join us for the post-concert party. Jeez, I wasn't heavy, I wasn't pawing her, I didn't even flirt with her; I acted the gentleman and I just said I'd enjoyed talking to her and could we meet again?

Bitch sold the interview to the National Enquirer. About two per cent of that interview was about religion, another three per cent about politics, another five about sex; in the paper, that's all we talked about. I talked about.

According to that article I was a communist atheist who'd screw anything in skirts and was anyway bisexual (I'd admitted I'd slept with a guy once, just to see what it was like; it was nothing special and I kept having to think of women to keep a hard-on, and I made the point that I'd avoided sodomy from either end, so to speak and, while the whole experience wasn't totally unpleasant, I'd no intention of repeating it; and, damn it, I'd said it was off the record!). I was also trying to corrupt and pervert the minds of all decent, patriotic, mom— and dad-loving American children with my vicious, drug, Marx, anti-Christ and semen-sodden song lyrics.

Oh, did we have some albums burned south of the MasonDixon line.

Suddenly it was noticed that the instrumental on the first side of Liquid Ice was called 'Route 666'. The number of the beast! Oh God, oh Jesus, lock up your nuns! This was a joke, of course; I'd originally called the song '25/68', naming it according to the opus numbering system I'd used when the only places my songs existed were in an old school exercise jotter, a low-fidelity, high-hiss C-60 cassette, and between my ears. '25/68' sounded too much like '25 or 6 to 4', by Chicago, so I renamed it after about ten seconds' thought, in the studio just after we'd recorded it.

Meant nothing. But suddenly it was a Sign that I was a Devil Worshipper. All the other lyrics were put under the microscope as well then; professors of colleges in the South where the level of learning was such they thought evolution was a blasphemy started writing learned articles proving that everything I wrote was directed at destroying the American Family, Flag and Way of Life.

Holy shit; I should have been so lucky!

Ah, what the hell; we didn't lose out. We must have sold another three or four extra albums for everyone thrown onto flaming pyres, just because of all the publicity. And having maniacal fundamentalist Christians turn up shrieking and waving banners where we were playing eventually became part of the show; they were as much part of the entourage as the groupies.

But there were death threats. I started to get paranoid, worrying about car bombs, people breaking into my hotel room... worst of all — because you could always protect yourself from that sort of threat, with enough security, sufficient money — I worried about somebody with a rifle in the auditorium. It might have been crazy, because of course there were always police and security men outside and inside the venues, but maybe not that crazy. If somebody was determined, they could get in, they could smuggle a rifle in beforehand and then buy a ticket; they could even get a job in the place, long before we arrived — tours are set up long enough in advance — and take a gun and a telescopic sight in any time they wanted. A spotlight operator would be the ideal person; those were the people that scared me most, I don't know why... the man with the Super Trooper and the Winchester M/70 Magnum...

I know it's crazy, but I started wearing a bullet-proof vest on stage. It made me feel like a looney, but it was the only thing that let me play; the worry about being out there, naked and exposed under the lights, picked out with the others, a tall, broad, stationary target, was starting to affect my playing. Sticky fingers; almost stage fright, a couple of times.

The vest was embarrassing — I kept it a secret from the others for months — but it calmed me; it worked. I could face the unseen mob and play them their music, and afterwards, as the police shoved people back from our limo and we crawled past clutching hands and anguished faces mouthing God knows what, secure within our thick green glass windows and armoured steel, on our way to secure hotel suites and whole floors patrolled by large men with bulging armpits, I could look into the night-time craziness of the people who wanted to tear us apart because they loved us and the people who wanted to tear us apart because they hated us, and feel less crazy: a sensible madman in a world where only paranoia prepared you for reality.

The Great Contra-Flow Smoke Curtain, the idea conceived that day in the English countryside outside Winchester, when Inez and I made a cloud and I danced in the ashes, the total bastard of an idea it took several months and a hundred grand to get just right, was produced by using lots of dry ice, fans, heaters, smoke machines, and lights, both laser and ordinary.

It consisted of fan-driven dry-ice machines, positioned above the front of the stage, and smoke machines — also fitted with fans, plus powerful electric heating elements — which were set at the edge of the stage beneath, directly under the line of ice machines, but staggered, so that each two-metre wide nozzle pointed at the space between the equally large ice-smoke outlets above, where giant intakes sucked the warm smoke away to outside vents; similar intakes between the smoke machines sucked the dry-ice fumes away as well, to avoid filling the whole auditorium with freezing fog.

There were lights positioned inside both smoke and ice machines, shining straight up and straight down respectively, as well as batteries of lasers and spots and strobes set up to illuminate the Curtain itself from various angles and directions. The Curtain was created by the opposing, interspersed streams of vapour, alternately boiling up and fuming down.

We had twenty-four of those units, though the number we actually used on any given night varied according to the size and shape of the venue's stage. It looked impressive as hell once it was all working, but getting the streams set just right, so that the currents didn't get all mixed up, and making sure the intakes didn't suck the ice fumes or smoke from the machines right alongside them, proved to be extremely tricky; we needed a Curtain check before the gig that was longer than the lighting and sound checks combined; and the Curtain had to be fine-tuned for each different auditorium. We were never entirely sure it was going to work.

We couldn't just leave it at that, of course, even with all the fabulous lights; we set up a massive battery of fans and what I guess were de-tuned concussion grenades or claymore mines or something, so that, instead of just switching the Curtain off, we could blast a gigantic hole out through it, revealing the band in one vast, backlit explosion of smoke and sound and light. And we had big booms and moving platforms built too, and wire harnesses set up, so that we could just suddenly appear through the Curtain, more or less anywhere.